Alright here goes, last night I installed the H80i on my stock i7 2600K to check the noiselevels (The cooling wasnt really a major concern, I knew that would be exeptional).

At first I was horrified, as the noise was just unbearable, the pump sounded like a carengine and the fans were trying to commit suicide.

No panic though, I figured the best course of action was to play around with Corsair Link and see if I could manually set the damn thing straight.

Fans were no problem, setting them to a fixed RPM of 700 turned down the noise alot (They are virtually inaudible at those RPM), but the pump remained the same no matter how I set it. Finally I managed to get it to a level that seemed acceptable but still not great. I was strongly considering going back to my aircooler and RMAing the damn thing.

But today I installed the new Corsair Link Dashboard and then updated the firmware of the H80i.... and I must say I am impressed. Now my case (NZXT Phantom) does bring noise down a fair bit from inside the case but still, now the H80i makes about as much noise as a good aircooler, meaning almost nothing.

Cooling is also great, I clocked the CPU to 4.6Ghz (Nothing amazing, I know, but it was just to see how the cooler would perform). So far I havent gone above 55C during SuperPi, Heaven Benchmark or 3Dmark11 wich to me seems like a pretty good number.

My idle temps are around 35C, and loadtemps varies depending on if I am playing games or running benchmarks but 55C seems to be the most it will ever reach. Another thing is how fast the temps drop to idle after finishing a benchmark, it takes a few seconds for the cooler to drop the CPU from 55C to about 40C, if you are shutting down a game it takes roughly the seconds the game takes to close, and after that another 20 seconds maybe down to low idle.

So final verdict? If properly updated the H80i has amazing performance, both in cooling and noise and is well worth the price if you want watercooling but dont feel like building your own loop.

I hope atleast someone might find this thead informative, and if anyone has questions il answer them as best I can.

Thanks for the post, question though have you ever owned the old H series coolers from corsair?

No, this is my first one so I dont really know anything about their performance and such, though I heard mostly good things about atleast the H80 and H100... the others like H50/60/70 and whatnot I dont know **** about

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ron Kreshmar

Thanks Hukkie,
Could you also describe the rest of your fan setup locations and direction of flow.
TIA
Ron

I have directed the airflow in from the front and bottom / out from the top and back. Got 1 x 140mm / 2 x 120mm fans pulling air into the case and 2 x 200mm in the top (roof) pushing it out. Other then that the 120mm fanplacement in the back holds my CPU radiator with dual 120mm fans pushing air out of the case, and on the floor of the case my GPUradiator (Also dual fans) is currently pushing air out of the case aswell (Changing to pulling air in when I have a dustfilter for it).

So right now the airflow is a bit uneven, more fans pushing out then in, but it will even out quite a bit once I flip the bottom radiator fans sometime in the middle of this week.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frozenoblivion

Needs PICS!!!

There are pictures on my profile from the last update when I installed the H80i and that annoying Corsair Airflow Fan on the memory (Stongly considering taking it out, we shall see what happens).